SLWTF – A Second Life travelogue by Garth Goode

Dear Bot Farmer,

The “eject” function on the security system with which you are trying to hide your bots isn’t working too well. Pwned!

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Vogue/135/138/696

One of the readers of this blog passed on a tip about some bots hovering above a dance club. While the the tip was nice, I think that she (and someone else I met checking out the bots) were more concerned that the bot building was festooned with the logo of a different club, from which they hail. They thought that the owner of the club was somehow trying to steal it’s name. Which may be the case, although I can think of better ways of stealing a club name than using it on a bot farm 700 meters in the sky of a parcel where flying is disabled. The only people who would see it, are, well… bot hunters. Which, I admit, are a sophisticated clientele, and good tippers. But there’s not that many of them.

Be that as it may, I’m less concerned with this club-name-stealing thing than I am with these poor misshapen bots. They’re stuck inside a weird, maze-like piece of floating crap in the sky. Frankly, they’re kind of pointless — the people in the club far outnumber the bots.

Still, it takes a certain kind of mental flatulence to create bots that are so horribly deformed. Even this guy is a looker by comparison. If these were old bots I could maybe see these as being Ruth’s ugly stepsisters, but they’re fairly new. Which means that their creator had to make a conscious effort to switch these bots from the pretty passable default choices to… this.

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Classic%20Rock/136/170/702

So there I was hovering below what looked to be a pretty obvious bot farm in the sky. The bottom of it was interesting — Maybe it was meant to look like a piece of ground lifted from the Earth, but came off seeming like and upside-down lemon meringue pie.

Then, someone fell out of it.

It happened over and over. Different avatars, but pretty obviously bots. Sometimes I’d see the same one fall through again. Sometimes and unrezzed cloud avatar would fall through, leaving a trail of mist behind it (which was actually very pretty). My guess was that there was some small gap in the floor inside the bot farm that they were falling through, and something was putting them back in the farm to repeat the process.

I let myself fall along with a bot to see where they landed, which turned out to be right behind the bot farmer’s store. (Careful if you do this, the land is damage enabled). If there were any justice they would have fallen into the store, but no luck.

I will say that the bot farmer had a little fun with his minions, as Naked Midget Lady With The Big Gun proves.

Inside the bot farm I found something I’d never seen before. The bot farmer himself was sitting in front of his children. Was he controlling them in some way? Was that what was making them fall through the floor? Why were they so crowded together? Alas, he was away from his keyboard, so we never did get to talk.

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Ario%20Isle/236/82/507

Here’s an increasingly common occurrence. You arrive on an island and it looks like there might be a bot colony there. You land where a lot of green dots are situated and sure enough, no one is around. But when you look at your mini-map, the arrows are pointing up, not down. So the bots are not in a skybox….

But, wait a second. Right under this gazebo there is only ground. Could it be…?

Yes, it’s true. Don’t be fooled by what you see in the background What you’re looking at is a box of bots underneath the ground. Not in a tunnel or cave, but actually embedded inside the dirt, where avatars (in theory) can’t go.

There are18 bots jammed in a 2x2x2 box. It’s a pretty tight squeeze, so prim hair and skirts just stick out. Messy! I expect bot farmers to be tidier than this. Also note that this Bot-Box is a product someone actually sells openly. Talk about slimy.

Inside the box you can sort of see how the bots are shoved together. It’s a little difficult because some of them are rezzing

Move in a little closer and you can see how crazily the bots’ twisted bodies overlap. That’s a lot of bots in a very small space, and the result is almost… art.

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Fantasy%20Dream/125/151/41

After pushing those bots off their platform a little while back, it’s been hard to find anything interesting about the other bot farms I’ve found recently. This collection stands out, if only because of the sheer laziness of the bot farmer. There’s no attempt to make them look like anything other than bots, right down to a numbered naming scheme.

So here I a in a room full of white-t-shirt-guy clones. One of them has black hair. As for the rest of them, they’re all pretty much the same. Usually bot farms like to mix it up and make their bots at least seem like they might be people. Not this guy. Assembly line active, ka-chunk, ka-chunk, ka-chunk. The guy with black hair is probably a quality defect.

You know the bots are packed tight when some are standing on the others or flailing around. trying to land on a solid surface. Seriously, they’re flailing. It’s almost comical.

Maybe they look the same on the outside, but on the inside they’re individuals, yearning to be free. Let’s take a closer look at one of them…

Closer…

Closer…

TOO CLOSE!!!!

Can you see it? The serene expression, the glazed eyes, the vacant stare…

Hey…

Wait a second…

THESE BOTS ARE HIGH!

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Twickenham/32/24/22